Literary Analysis—Poetry

The Language of Literature

 

          If your professor assigns a literary analysis—perhaps a short story--you will most likely analyze the characters (e.g., are they demanding, selfish, or portrayed as childlike?) and the setting (e.g., an old farmhouse or in urban London?). You would also consider the use of other literary techniques, such as irony, flashbacks, symbolism, and conflict. If you’re analyzing a poem, you’ll be looking at poetic devices such as alliteration, meter, and imagery. If you’re analyzing an essay, you might be analyzing the essay for allusion, logos, and diction. Your professor will explain more when the essay is assigned.

Poets and prose writers may use different techniques to emphasize the tone and meaning of their works, but they depend upon common literary devices to suggest levels of meaning beyond the literal: figurative language, allusions, imagery, and symbolism.

 

          Figurative language refers to the many devices of wordplay that a writer can use, such as metaphors, similes, synecdoche using a part to suggest a whole, as in “head” to refer to cattle or “brain” to refer to a bright student), onomatopoeia (words that echo the sound of their referents, like “buzz”), puns, and ironic understatement (litotes) and exaggerations (hyperbole). Of these, probably the one most crucial to poetry is metaphor. Much of the way humans learn involves linking one perceived thing or event to another. Literature presents the readers with vicarious experiences, stimulating new insights and fresh perceptions of relationships between things. Metaphor, the verbal linking of disparate things, is at the heart of poetry’s power to increase its readers’ awareness of reality, to instruct and delight. Metaphors link items together, making comparisons without the aid of the words “like” and “as.” Similes are direct comparisons that do use “like” or “as.” When Emily Dickinson writes, “God is a distant—stately Lover,” she is using metaphor. Robert Burns, on the other hand, employs a simile as he writes, “O my love’s like a red, red rose.”

 

Metaphors

          A metaphor may be extended, with many points of comparison explored, to the point where it develops as an analogy. The “Metaphysical” poets of the seventeenth-century, such as John Donne and George Herbert, used metaphor with wit and, often, reverence, pointing to the analogical relationships between all creatures. Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV,” for example, builds an intricate analogy to show how God’s grace, which seeks to capture his soul, is like the capturing of an enemy town in a battle. Similarly, Anne Morrow Lindbergh builds her reflective essay “The Channeled Whelk” by finding the shells she finds on the beach to be intricate analogies of human life.

 

Imagery

          Imagery is another major element that contributes to the texture and tone of literature. Imagery refers to words which evoke for readers their physical senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. By using image-laden words, the writer is able to build a densely imagined scene in the readers’ minds. Images tend to sharpen the picture brought to the imagination by verbs or nouns, making you aware of a specific object, not a generalization, a concrete object that can be sense physically, not an abstraction. For example, if you say “the man ate a vegetable,” you are not giving enough information for a reader or listener to call it vividly to mind. A writer wishing to convey a picture of this man and vegetable will add image words, which may consist of nearly every part of speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, or prepositions. The writer observes the scene closely—either an actual scene or an imagined scene—and chooses his words carefully to evoke the senses:

 

          The thin young man, dressed in jeans and a black t-shirt that hung loosely from his shoulder blades, stared at the artichoke lying sideways on the cracked plate before him, wondering how to eat the thing, wondering what to eat of the thing, hesitating, poking it with his fork, probing the mystery of its pale green leaves that spiraled densely around the monstrous flower bud, each leaf hostile with its thorn-tipped crown, smelling like boiled spinach, hissing with the steam rising from its hidden heart, daring him to eat it.

 

          This example is, of course, exaggerated; you would probably not create such a long and complex sentence, but it illustrates how you can create a scene or character that engages the imagination of a reader because it has first engaged the imagination of the writer. Good writing of the mimetic forms, that is, the forms that mirror reality, as poetry, fiction, and drama, build on the foundation of sense images that allow the reader to have a vivid experience of the world the literature ushers in.

 

          While some students think poetry is difficult because it is too “abstract,” the opposite is usually true. Poetry characteristically does not draw out explicit abstract meanings—leaving these for the reader to work out. It presents images. It is concrete. It tugs at our senses, putting our imaginations to work. And it results from a belief that the thing itself, the object portrayed with all its density, can mean many things to a discerning reader. As good craftsmen, poets are respectful of their subject (the sensuous world they inhabit) and their material (the words they order and shape upon the page). Poems, then, while they may not be always easy to understand, do evoke the sense, awakening the imagination to the colors, shapes, lines, the tone and rhythms, the smell and feel of the real world. Poetry may lead readers to ideas, but it leads them through the sensuous world of humans and nature. It rarely is vague, general, or abstract—and its claim to validity is not its logic. Poetry appeals to memory and hope, to the imaginative world of the heart and the senses.

 

          The imagery of Mary Oliver’s “Morning Poem” creates a sense of morning sunrise, the slow gathering light that reveals details of a scene—not by an abstract definition of the time, but by Oliver adding one sense detail upon another. The images in the first lines of the poem have been italicized:

 

Every morning

the world is created.

Under the orange

 

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

 

and fasten themselves to the highest branches—

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on the painted islands

 

of summer lilies.

 

          Bodily motion, muscular tension, and balance are evoked by kinesthetic imagery. Lines from the Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover” cited below illustrate kinesthetic imagery, conveying a sense of the motion of the hawk as it soars in the air:

 

          Of the rolling level underneath him steady air and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.

 

          By using such imagery, expressed with a diction that strikes readers as unusual, and often difficult, Hopkins is challenging readers to see beauty in the common experience of glancing at a hawk soaring in the sky. If readers were to paraphrase these lines in everyday, common, diction, they might say that the hawk is “gliding on the wind and turning in the sky.” That would remove the challenging diction, but it would also remove all the techniques—the rhythm, the alliteration, and the diction—that Hopkins uses to make reader freshly see and experience the grace, beauty, and strength of this particular bird in its particular sky on this particular morning. His diction is urging readers, “Stop. Look. Pay attention. Something beautiful is happening right above you. See—there is the beauty of the natural world.”

 

          A less common type of imagery, synesthetic, evokes one sense by referring to another (as when a sound suggests a color or a smell evokes an imagined sound or color). Robert Hayden, in the poem “Those Winter Sundays,” uses this type of imagery, conveying the feeling of cold, winter morning air by descriptions of color and sound. He speaks of “blueblack cold” and says, “I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.”

 

Allusions

          Allusions, mentioning earlier works of art or historical figures in a text to bring in the cultural heritage of the past—its art, music, literature, and history—add another element to the textual richness and meaning of a literary work. A writer may also allude to current events or arts, bringing in the present cultural environment as another way to enrich the text. In the art of cinema, directors sometimes copy well known scenes from earlier movies, thus alluding to them and creating a subtext to their story. And in painting and music, artists and composers will similarly include images or themes from the works of others.

Galway Kinnell’s poem “St. Francis and the Sow,” for example, cites St. Francis, a medieval saint known for his love of all creatures, would have blessed the sow:

“as Saint Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow. . . .”

 

 

          Below are some common literary devices (often called literary techniques) used in poetry. Look up any terms you don’t know plus any other terms your teacher suggests. This website has definitions for these terms and many others.

 

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Form in Poetry

          Anticipating the unexpected requires that you have some knowledge of the various forms or structures of poetry. When you know what makes the kind of poem we call a sonnet, fourteen lines of strictly rhyming and accented verse, you can recognize the and be pleased by the variations made by poets like E.E. Cummings and Gerard Manley Hopkins. However unusual “next to of course god america i” or “The Windhover” appear, they are both sonnets.

 

          In many ways, poetry is a game—a game played with words, with sounds, with sense images. Good poets, like Cummings and Hopkins, play the game well and enjoy creating new strategies—just as any game player likes to surprise others, and himself perhaps, with daring new moves on the playing field. But the writers are not the only players in this game of poetry. When you read a poem, you become a participant in the game, too. You become a skilled player as you practice, getting used to the “rules”—the conventions of the art—and having patience with yourself as you get used to the “action” of this game.

Robert Frost believed that the good poem brings surprises to both the writer and the reader. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” he said in his brief essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.” To him, the poem was not completely thought out before the poet put his pen to paper; instead, the poem was a process; composing brought insights and conclusions not known beforehand. The poem, Frost said, “finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad.” Frost, too enjoyed the game of poetry and knew it—like love—to bring both pleasure and wisdom, the traditional ends of poetry recognized since the day of the Greeks and Romans:

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification… but in a momentary stay against confusion. (“The Figure a Poem Makes”)

 

          Even if poetry is considered a kind of game, it remains an unfamiliar and difficult game to many modern students. Skilled poets throw unusual images and diction at their readers, challenging the ability to read with a highly condensed, metaphoric wording that too often seems to end not in Frost’s “clarification,” but in confusion. English teachers seem to have a mysterious interpretive key to these poetic puzzles, but students feel defeated by them and doubt that the struggle to read them is really worthwhile. Part of the problem may come with the technical jargon teachers use when talking about poetry. Like any profession, from computer programming to electrical engineering, literary criticism has its own vocabulary. Phrases like “iambic pentameter” or “feminine rhyme” may provide shortcuts to communication for those who know this language, but, like all technical jargon, this vocabulary excludes those who are unfamiliar with it. As a student reader, you will want to learn some of the basic terminology that will help you analyze and explain the processes you observe in your reading.

 

          In addition to the often challenging diction of poetry, poetry requires a kind of imagination that is less needed in most prose—where the meaning is often contained in the literal level that proceeds orderly from point to point—step by step in directions for a process, like a cookbook or a manual of instructions, chronological order in simple story telling, or cause and effect relationships in an idea-centered essay. Poetry may use these patterns also, of course, but fundamentally poetry works by analogy, seeing in a literal level meanings that may suggest other levels of meaning. Things are compared; likenesses are evoked in the reader’s imagination. The analogical relationship may be conveyed by a metaphor or a simile. The Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote the famous line “My love is like a red, red, rose,” expressing his emotion in a simile. The seventeenth century poet George Herbert uses metaphors (“thy cage,” “rope of sands,” and “cable”) to help us feel his frustrations with the duties and disciplined life as a clergyman, picturing them as restraints in lines from his poem “The Collar”:

“. . . leave thy cold dispute of what is fit and not.

Forsake thy cage,

Thy rope of sands

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee

Good cable to enforce and draw, / And be thy law . . . .”

 

          Often, the whole poem may state an experience that suggests a more general level of significance. “The Collar,” for example, reflects not just Herbert’s passing frustration and dissatisfaction, but a reader’s similar feelings. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” may remind readers of their small decisions that changed the direction of their later lives. Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” creates different feelings in readers, shaped by their personal memories from childhood.

Understanding a poem—experiencing a poem—demands an active imagination that can move from the literal meaning of a poem—its symbols and metaphors—to other, analogical, levels, to personal memories, feelings, and values. That is, a poem may remind you of your own lives, of past emotions and situations; it may challenge you with a new way of looking at something you have taken for granted, a fresh way of seeing and thinking, evoking questions and insights.

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The Sounds of Poetry

          The rhythm of spoken English is formed primarily by stress patterns—combinations of accented and unaccented syllables. Sound elements that may be dominant in other languages, such as duration and pitch, play a subordinate role in conveying meaning in English. Since stress patterns are dominant, they have received the greater attention in analyzing the sound of poetry in English, and they have, through the years, been described by a technical vocabulary.

 

          Meter is the term used to describe the rhythm that stress patterns create in the flow of speech. Poetic meter is comprised of feet—small patterned units of stressed and unstressed syllables that make up a poetic line. The lines themselves have patterns—regularity of length and number—that comprise the stanza. Most traditional poems have a fundamental pattern of meter that may be subtly varied to make more interesting sound texture. Many modern poets compose in free verse, poetry that does not have a regularity of meter.

 

The following links will take you to detailed information about poetic forms, meter, and rhyme:

• http://www.math.grinnell.edu/~simpsone/Connections/textbook.html

• http://www.thepoetsgarret.com/form.html

 

Assignment

Writing a Literary Analysis of a Poem

 

          Since a literary analysis "takes apart" a piece of literature and closely examines literary techniques used in the text, you will be writing in order to show how they contribute to its overall theme. The purpose of this essay is to give you practice closely examining the various points of view represented in a text, then writing about how each one contributes to the theme of the entire piece.

 

          Please note analysis is NOT a line-by-line explanation of the meaning of the text. Nor is it merely a summary of the text. A literary analysis attempts to identify the use of specific literary devices AND establish the relationship between that device and the meaning of the text. Think of it as attempting to show the relationship of the part to the whole.

 

Directions

The introduction must include the following:

• a brief, descriptive summary of the text

• a brief statement of the literary devices and the point you wish to illuminate (one of the author’s points)

• a clear, precise thesis statement that indicates the paper’s topic, focus, and implies its purpose (to inform or to persuade).

Sample Thesis: In "Dover Beach," Matthew Arnold's use of symbolism, rhyme, and allusion create a haunting and prophetic sense of alienation and despair at the coming of the twentieth century.

 

The body of the essay must include the following:

Body Paragraph 1: Discuss the first literary device (e.g., symbolism) and how it contributes to the meaning of the entire piece. Include examples from the work (quotations, paraphrases, etc.) to support your explanation.

 

Body Paragraph 2: Discuss the second literary device (e.g., rhyme) and how it contributes to the meaning of the entire piece. Include examples from the work (quotations, paraphrases, etc.) to support your explanation.

 

Body Paragraph 3: Discuss the third literary device (e.g., allusion) and how it contributes to the meaning of the entire piece. Include examples from the work (quotations, paraphrases, etc.) to support your explanation.

 

The conclusion must rephrase your thesis and summarize your main points; draw general conclusions about how the author uses the various literary techniques to convey his/her purpose to the reader. BE CREATIVE. Do not flatly list your major points. The conclusion is the last (and often lasting) impression.

 

General Reminders about Academic Writing:

 

1. Refer to the text using present tense verbs (NOT “George Orwell stated,” BUT “George Orwell states”)

2. Refer to the author by name, using his or her full name or last name.

3. Document thoroughly and accurately using MLA format.

4. Write all paragraphs in the third person. Do not use first person pronouns (I, we, our) or second person pronouns (you, your).

5. Each paragraph should have a clear topic sentence appropriate for each paragraph and a concluding sentence and/or sense of closure

6. Maintain an appropriately academic tone; avoid clichés, slang, colloquial expressions, and religious jargon.

7. Assume your audience has NOT read the text you are analyzing. Consequently, include context for the examples you include so your reader can understand the points you’re making.

 

Literary Analysis Sample Paragraph

(illustrates analysis paragraph structure only)

 

          Matthew Arnold further amplifies the theme of alienation and human suffering by alluding to Sophocles in the second stanza. He notes, "Sophocles long ago/Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought/Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow/Of human misery" (Arnold 30). Sophocles, perhaps the most noted of Greek tragedians, was famous not least because his plays produced in the audience an almost overwhelming sense of the futility and injustice often encountered in human existence. One tragedy in particular deals with the dangers of a retreat from absolutes—the retreat of the "Sea of Faith"—Sophocles’ play Antigone (Arnold 30).  The heroine of the play, Antigone, chooses to obey the ancient and immutable laws of the gods and bury her dead brother. In doing so, she disobeys civil law, violating King Creon's decree that her dead brother, a traitor to the state, shall not be buried. In other words, she refuses to join ranks with one who has divorced himself from the timeless and unchangeable moral law and who now drifts in a sea of his own relativism. As a result, she is sentenced to death and ultimately takes her own life. Thus, Sophocles, like Arnold, hears the distant retreat of the "Sea of Faith" (Arnold 30). Furthermore, he knows the kind of alienation that can accompany its withdrawal. Arnold chooses Sophocles as a fellow prophet who also foresees the dangers and misery that will inhabit any society that cut its moorings from ancient safe-harbors.

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  Suggested Selections to Analyze

Theodore Roethke..................................................................... “My Papa’s Waltz”

Gerard Manley Hopkins...............................................................“God’s Grandeur”

Gerard Manley Hopkins............................................................. “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

Mary Oliver................................................................................“The Kingfisher”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer................................................................... “Who Am I?”

e. e. cummings.........................................................................“next to of course god America I”

Emily Dickinson.........................................................................“Wild Nights - Wild Nights!”

Joy Harjo..................................................................................“Eagle Poem”

Galway Kinnell...........................................................................“St. Francis and the Sow”

Walt McDonald..........................................................................“Faith is a Radical Master”

Mary Oliver...............................................................................“Morning Poem”

William Shakespeare................................................................. Romeo and Juliet, Act I, scene 5, lines 94-113

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